I used, supported and developed for WordPress(.org) for many years (and still do from time to time). It’s a good comparison.
It’s worth noting that end users have very little say over WordPress core - it’s overseen by a commercial company and is largely directed by them. As you say, it too is a hot mess of plugins - many abandoned now as developers move onto other products, other projects or just don’t have the time to keep up with changes to core. I developed a few (private) WP plugins myself, and there was a burden keeping them in sync with changes in core, especially when they were no longer for active projects.
(You can see that with Obsidian - a number of plugins are temporarily broken with Live Editing mode; others were a good idea someone had many months ago but have not been developed since).
I had problems on WP with sites going down or becoming insecure - rarely because of the core, almost always because of a faulty plugin conflicting with another plugin, not conforming to published standards or not being updated. I learned to use just a small number of plugins, and generally ones that were commercially supported with a support team I could access if required. They weren’t entirely problem free, but were unlikely to be abandoned.
WordPress was, and is, free and highly extensible. That suits many users and ultimately it was usually web developers who had to deal with the mess, not end users. Whether Obsidian will reap similar benefits we’ll see. My personal opinion is it’s probably “peak Obsidian” - not a bad peak to be at for sure. Whether Obsidian users are also willing to pay for feature sets to be supported by plugins also remains to be seen. A business building an e-commerce website is different to a student managing their notes.
I find it easy enough to type the four link characters — [](] — and H1, H2, H3 for headers, and == for comments. I don’t use keyboard shortcuts for those things in any Markdown editor.
I get that Obsidian does not work for you. That’s fine. It’s not for everyone. It is a VERY VERY opinionated design, and does not follow the rules for Mac apps.
Two frustrations that come up regularly on the Obsidian users forum:
The default for “search again” in text searches is not Cmd-G.
No support for multiple app windows open simultaneously.
My frustration with WordPress is that it has become so complex and design-oriented that I find it difficult to use for microblogging. I have never gotten used to the WordPress block editor, and I often like to run untitled posts, which Wordpress does not like.
I use Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook for microblogging now, and each of those services have their own problems — including that I have to use three services to reach everybody I want to reach, because everything on the Internet is in silos now. I do a lot of cut-and-pasting of the same stuff to three places.
Basically, what I’m looking for is Twitter without length limitations. I’m not expecting to find that soon.
Check out Microblog if you haven’t. It’s designed for microblogging (surprise!) and plays reasonably well with other services. I think it was originally envisioned as a place you can blog, own your content, and feed it out to other services
I was suggesting less as a destination, and more as a platform — post there and propagate the posts out to FB, Twitter, Instagram or wherever. Just because you raised your dissatisfaction with Wordpress for microblogging
It is a good suggestion. Micro.blog is a good service and fine alternative to Wordpress and the social media silos, for those who need a simple blog.
However, I found it unsuitable for my needs. I share a lot of memes and found Internet photos. Also, I like to share to Tumblr and Twitter in their native formats. I do a lot of cut-and-pasting and make slight modifications appropriate to each platform.
I’ve been using the Things theme for a month now. It looks much better and I’ve gotten used to just typing in the markdown characters. I’ll say I’ve made my peace with the Obsidian Editor, but I do think it can be improved.
Following up on the previous post, I’ve updated the repo with a new CSS snippet file which makes the YAML frontmatter look amazing in the live preview mode:
